The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which may be unique on their own.
Graph-oriented databases are designed for storage of graphical structures to represent information. A typical graph structure in a graph-oriented database represents the significant objects or entities of interest as a set of nodes, connected by edges, the edges describing the relationship between nodes. Further, the nodes and edges may also have properties.
There are several graph-oriented database products available and/or presently in use. For example, Pregel is Google's graph engine, designed to mine relationships from graphs, but it is not capable of delivering real time search results as it is a batch process. Neo4J is an open-source NOSQL graph database, providing an object-oriented, flexible structure with transactional capability, but is not horizontally scalable. HyperGraphDB is a general purpose distributed storage mechanism using a standard key/value store nomenclature to handle graph nodes and edges.
It remains an objective of database designers, architects and researchers to find improved methods of storing and accessing data for use in data operations.